The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

Over the past couple of months, I have been engaging adolescents in Marion County in centering their voices to identify heart health needs and propose solutions that are meaningful to them. The adolescent heart project emerged from the suggestions of the adults in the CUAHD project. Thus far, the experience of working with teenagers to design and implement a health campaign targeting heart disease has been interesting, and speaks to the uniqueness of our broad theoretical framework, the culture-centered approach that seeks to locate decision making power into the hands of the community. An example of the interesting dynamic that is playing out in the project is the concept of individualism versus collectivism in decision making and in driving the project forward. On March 6, I emailed the group about my inability to attend the planned strategy development workshop due to bad weather .Interestingly, the group proceeded with organizing the workshop as originally scheduled, and also set ...

In our ""CCA" module, we discussed the nuances in our understandings of objectivity in the social sciences. Delineating the break from the natural sciences, understandings of objectivity in the social sciences are constituted in the values of the researcher, her/his constructions of the self, her/his relationship with the subjectivity of the research participants, and her/his negotiations with materiality. That there are material contexts of symbolic behavior is a key point in culturally-centered work, and yet this material context is negotiated symbolically, through language and through acts of representation. In this sense, communication lies at the heart of the social sciences, the world of the material being negotiated through meaning making. We come to understand materiality through the symbolically mediatized narrativization of the material world. For example, the everyday lived experience of struggling with hunger is a material reality that is felt in the...

The hegemony of West-centrism and the question of academic freedom: From a half-baked lens in my short time in Singapore Recently, a colleague at Nanyang Technological University, an associate professor of communication Dr. Cherian George was denied tenure (http://storify.com/kuekj/denial-of-tenure-sparks-furore).   Dr. Cherian is considered a leading public intellectual in Singapore, one who has opened up the discursive space to conversations about Singapore and its politics (http://www.cheriangeorge.net/).   This instance of Dr. Cherian’s denial of tenure has become the subject of widespread political participation, letter writing, and conversations across Singapore. The social media is rife with multiple conversation threads that have questioned the tenure and promotion process at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) as well as the fairness of the outcome (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/niftyc/archives/790).   Outpouring support from students and ...

When we began the partnership between the Indiana Minority Health Coalition, Lake County Minority Health Coalition, Minority Health Coalition of Marion County and Purdue University, we had two broad pictures in mind: (a) our partnership was focused on building health information capacities among African Americans in Lake and Marion Counties of Indiana, so that community members would have access to the health information they needed in addressing their heart health issues; and (b) our partnership began with the understanding that local community values, beliefs, and understandings ought to be centered in how problems and solutions came to be understood, implemented and evaluated. Now, as our culturally-centered heart health campaign wraps up the initial phase, I am struck by some key lessons regarding culturally-centered processes of social change, both in terms of research methodology as well as in terms of the development and evaluation of the campaign. The first lesson I have lea...

I sit here head sunk in shame in the knowing that my Hindu soul stands a silent witness In the murder of a muslim brother. You say he was a terrorist one that deserves to die So I should celebrate so you don't count me as a traitor to my Hindu state of birth. I sit here unable to argue unable to have a conversation with you Because I too am the majority that takes for granted my body my privilege my identity Like you, I am complicit in murder. I sit here and write a poem in my pain as I witness a muslim brother led to the gallows. Without evidence Without due process With questions left unanswered. I sit here because I know that's what happens when you are muslim in Hindu India. I sit here and hold my child in pain As I know somewhere in Kashmir A child, the child of a terrorist has no father to hug him and to protect. A child left by his father to be cared for by God.

Many of you have heard me share with you stories of my grandmother, Nana. An amazingly strong woman, nana was a healer, a knower of secrets that worked wonders on my health and my spirits. She was an amazing source of knowledge, one who believed in the principles of Marxist socialism and also believed in the incredible powers of the spirit. She was an avid reader, one who read more than eight hours a day. The daughter of a medical doctor and the niece of the scientist Sir J C Ghosh, the architect of India's now-fabled IITs, she was a student of science. Married to a family of engineers, she voraciously read books for herself, her husband, her children and her grandchildren. Nana taught me to love the world of books. For her, the spirit of science was embodied in asking questions, in not taking things for granted, and in drawing upon systematic observations to arrive at conclusions. Perhaps it is this very spirit of science that worked in her everyday resources of hea...

July 5, 2010. In an article titled " The trophies of Operation Green Hunt ," the academic Nandini Sundar interrogates the complete erasure of stories of large scale violence deployed by the Indian state on its tribal subjects. She documents the rapes, murders, arrests, and encounters, most of which are disproportionately carried out on women. The unprecedented degree of state-sponsored violence carried out on indigenous women is the subject of her critical interrogation. Most of these stories of violence go unnoticed and unheard. We don't feel outrage as middle-class subjects of Shining India, having been led to believe that this is collateral damage that is natural to our democracy. The media mostly don't cover the cases, and even when they do, the story is buried somewhere in a back page in a small paragraph. And even when we see these stories, we pass on, getting on with our lives. We are normalized into not feeling empathy. Noting this collective inabili...